AI Predicts That These Startups Will Succeed

Market researchers, when assessing potential startup ideas, rely on their analytical experience and evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

ButQuid, a market research company, wants to take that to the next level by letting machine learning systems use statistical data on thousands of startups from around the world to determine the potential winners.

In 2009, then known as YouNoodle, Quid was challenged by Bloomberg Businessweek to pick 50 startups that are set to shake their businesses from a poll of 50,000 companies.

To make its list, Quid’s AI crunched data on multiple criteria, such as investment capital raised and at what pace (days between funding rounds), founder experience, the business sector potential, competition from other startups in the same niche, among others.

Quid had a strong evaluation for Spotify, Etsy, Evernote, Palantir, Cloudera, Zynga, OPOWER, and Twitch–each very successful in its sector and well-known to the public.

Had all of the 50 startups been part of the same venture portfolio, it would have been the second-best-performing venture capital fund in the last two decades.

Businessweek asked Quid to make a new list of 50 startups that it deems to be the most-likely to succeed.

Cashing in on AI Predicting Superpower

The strength of deep learning lies in the ability to analyze phenomenal amounts of data, and classify large amounts of recurring patterns, which are sometimes subtle clues imperceptible to humans.

It is this ability that AI prediction power stems from, and the one that makes the bread and butter of many startups.

An Israeli AI startup can predict the box office success of a film based only on its plot DNA. Take Vault’s 4CAST system relies on the movie’s screenplay or trailer to tell how many tickets it would end up selling.

MogAI is an AI developed by an Indian startup, which had predicted the winner in the last U.S. presidential election. Two weeks ahead of the election, MogAI named Donald Trump as the likely President-elect of the U.S., after having also predicted the presidency of Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

In the UK, a startup chose to enter the niche of soccer betting.

The outcomes of soccer games are very difficult to predict, yet Stratagem thinks it could with Machine Learning. To do so, the company, which is still raising funds, will train its deep neural network to analyze tens of thousands of soccer game reports written by teams of human analysts, combined with data available from traditional bookmakers.